Overall View About Malware And a Few Facts About The Security Of Mac Computers

"Malware is the abbreviation for malicious software. All of these malicious programs have a same characteristic that damages user's computers. Depending on different behaviours, they can classify malware into various types including worms, trojan horses or viruses.

Viruses are software programmed to infect computers and to cause damages to the system. Computer viruses have become more and more dangerous.

The history of virus started in 1987 when one of the first viruses called Lehigh appeared to attack  file. At the same time, another virus which existed was IBM Christmas that spread at a rapid speed. Later, more and more malicious viruses have appeared on the Internet.

The next type of malware is trojan horse. Its name comes from a famous story that the Grecian seized Troy city. Luckily, trojan horses are not infectious. People who create trojans disguise this kind of malware as legit software, useful tools or applications that easily attract Internet users to download them. Once trojans enter your computer, they will stay there to wait for proper time to steal personal data such as password or credit card number.

Worms are also another nightmare for Internet users. Worms combine the devastating nature of viruses and silent danger of trojans. Moreover, worms can infect computers in the world at a frightening speed. The typical worms are Mellisa or Love Letter. They spread through computers by sending themselves through email addresses found in infected computers. These emails often contain attractive content to trap receivers to open attached files.

A rootkit is a tool created to hide its existence, process, data and file in registry on the computer system. Users cannot detect these files or process if they only use common tools such as Task Manager or Find Files in Windows. Furthermore, rootkit can record what keyboards users press.

Nowadays, many people still think Mac OS X of Apple is safe and immune from malicious programs so Mac users do not care much about installing anti-virus software on their computers. In fact, similar to Windows, malware still infects Mac OS X but because the amount of Mac users is much less than that of Windows users, infected Mac computers are not mentioned frequently.

According to statistics, a virus called Flashback have infected more than 550.000 computers using Mac OS X. About 57% of infected computers are in the US, 20% in Canada and the rest stretch over the world. Obviously, the cyber threats are major problems to any Internet users."